By Ade Oluwasanmi (PhD student in the Keele Nanopharmaceutics Research Group , Institute for Science & Technology in Medicine, Keele University)
Medicine at the small scale
The exponential growth in nanopharmaceutics
Nanotechnology is the engineering of extremely small
particulates with a wide variety of applications. Nanopharmaceutics is a form of nanotechnology that involves the
formulation of medicines into very small doses suitable
for administration through various routes, such as, intravenously for example (nanomedicine). Often drug molecules have undesirable properties: For example, drugs
may not be very soluble in water or they may not be absorbed well by the body, which hinders their usage.
These drugs require careful formulation in order for them
to be administered to patients effectively and display their
proposed therapeutic effect. Traditional formulation strategies do not live up to the growing demands of recent
years where approximately 60% of all new drugs under
development are classed as practically insoluble in water.
Inevitably there has been an increase in nanomedicine
research worldwide. The most common nano-systems for
drug formulation are core-shell based systems. Many of
these systems have undergone the rigors of regulatory
testing and are now licensed for use in the clinic across
the globe.
The nano-structures act as chaperones for the drug molecules, carrying their cargo past the body’s defence systems and on to their intended target site, thus avoiding
any premature drug degradation or metabolism. The
nano-carriers themselves are relatively simple and cheap
to make and they can be easily tailored for application.
This tailoring may include the inclusion of specific functional groups which help the particles reach their destination more easily or confer additional properties, such as
fluorescence in order for their journey after administration
to be tracked.
Nanopharmaceutics research has experienced exponential growth internationally in the past ten years. Here at
ISTM we have a highly motivated and interdisciplinary
Nanopharmaceutics team who strive to drive forward innovation in this area. Our area of research spans across
the boundaries of chemistry, physics and the life sciences
with an aim to produce novel nanomedicines for a wide
variety of diseases.
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Our area of research spans
across the boundaries of
chemistry, physics and the life
sciences with an aim to produce novel nanomedicines.
NANOPHARMACEUTICS
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